Join the adventure - where no Saildrone has gone before!

Join the adventure - where no Saildrone has gone before! Be part of the team and experience what it is like to send a new method of research through some of the harshest seas on the planet to understand the ocean environment in a new and exciting way. Questions!? Email us! And we'll post your Q&A right here. 

28 July 2015 - Both sd-126 and sd-128 have successfully been recovered in Dutch Harbor, AK by the Saildrone team

27 July 2015 - Saildrones sd-126 and sd-128 are together again, about 3 km apart.  Today is their last e-mail data transmission until they reach Dutch Harbor. 

20 July 2015 - The Saildrones have reached M2 this morning and are now turned for Dutch Harbor, AK. Seven more days until the end of this mission.

10 July 2015 - The Saildrones continue their bifurcated tracks southward. We are not yet seeing a bloom-sign on the shelf. Below are maps displaying the salinity (left) and temperature (right) of the surface water along the Saildrone track.

01 July 2015 - Saildrone sd-128 has joined sd-126, heading north over the same track.  They have left the Yukon plume proper with its high CDOM values, and are starting to measure some higher salinities on the outer ends of their zigzag tracks. Below are maps displaying the CDOM (left) and salinty (right) of the surface water along the Saildrone track.

29 June 2015 - Saildrone sd-128 has moved eastward to the vicinity of Stuart Island, measuring warm, fresher, yellower water.  Sd-126 has moved northward, emerging from behind the track of sd-128, also measuring warmer, fresher, yellower water than it did farther out on the shelf. Below are maps displaying the salinity of sd-126 and sd-128 (left) and salinty of just sd-126 (right) of the surface water along the Saildrone track lines into Norton Sound.

24 June 2015 - Saildrone sd-128 continues across the Yukon plume measuring warmer, fresher, yellower water.  And sd-126’s track is hidden behind sd-128’s in the plot below (left) as it follows behind on the same track, but it is measuring even warmer, fresher and yellower water than sd-128 measured.

In the second plot (right) of the PAR time series (sample mean in green, +/- twice the sqrt of the sample variance in dashed red), we see that PAR is not dropping as low at night as it used to.  At first we thought that might be a slip in the calibration, but we hypothesize that as it moves farther north and the day lengthens, we are seeing midnight twilight as the sun just grazes just below the horizon. We also see, although the effect seems much less, in sd-126’s PAR, because it is a little farther south.

19 June 2015 - The lead Saildrone, sd-128, continues to measure warmer and fresher water containing terrestrial matter (CDOM) on the shoreward legs of the zigzags. This Yukon River plume is now being detected more to seaward on the zigzags. Although obscured by the sd-128 trackline, sd-126 is measuring similar results as it reoccupies the sd128 trackline. Below are plots displaying the salinity (left) and CDOM (right) of the surface water along the Saildrone track.

15 June 2015 - Saildrones sd-126 and sd-128 continue their zigzag courses northward.  At their shoreward ends they are encountering warm water, sometimes with lower salinity and sometimes with higher CDOM depending upon where they are. The wind has been mostly out of the south blowing Yukon River plume water northward, so I would expect the Saildrones will have to go further north to intersect the fresher plume. Below are plots displaying the water temperature (left) and wind vectors (right) along the Saildrone track.

26 April 2015 -  Both vehicles deployed safely and and almost at the M2 rendezvous. They saw 36 knots wind in the first night, beating into a Northerly out of dutch harbor, but handled it pretty well. (from Richard Jenkins, innovator and mastermind behind the Saildrone)

Launch of a Saildrone in Dutch Harbor, AK. Photo courtesy of Saildrone Inc.